Interesting question :) How does any site garner the first registration and usages, be it a forum or a Q&A site where you need both sides of the coin; those asking the questions and those answering them. I'm guessing it boils down to having a network already when you set it up that you can invite to be the first participants.
– GimbyOct 15 '15 at 8:20

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@Gimby You're probably right about Atwood's popularity playing a sizable part. I expect the gamification of the site helped too.
– JosephOct 15 '15 at 8:25

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Both Jeff and Joel already had sizable audiences from their own individual blogs.
– BobOct 15 '15 at 8:46

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That however does not answer the actual question I realize by thinking about it for more than 2 seconds - what did SO do such that it not only lifted off, but continued to attract people to it - especially the fact that people like to invest considerable amounts of their personal time in helping to keep the machine chugging is something quite unique to stack as a tech site. Be a darned well-designed site, for starters I'd say.
– GimbyOct 15 '15 at 8:59

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I won't be surprised if they pulled of a The Facebook-esque move and import expertsexchange questions. ;)
– CodeCasterOct 15 '15 at 9:02

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It was the time i almost got used to google's Not from site: experts-exchange predicate in extended search when i found a solution at SO.
– George PolevoyOct 15 '15 at 10:43

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This did not happen over-night. The first fat year, SO was not very good at generating useful Q+A. Lots of water-cooler chat, career-advice and jokes, lots of it has been deleted. Just take a glance at what survived, note that (almost) everybody that contributed back then has disappeared and never came back. Turn-around was ~Nov 2009, meta was the strongest influence in getting rid of the subjective stuff afaik. Lots of subject experts became active, liking the focus and format, the site got Google love and took off.
– Hans PassantOct 15 '15 at 11:17

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Similar to what Google did with Gmail, SO ran a not-very-seeekrit kewl-kidz-only beta program, so people were enticed to participate in part by the feeling of exclusivity and "hey, you're one of the in-crowd".
– shooverOct 15 '15 at 15:46

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@GeorgePolevoy that site had a lot to do with my initially learning to write my own adblock rules. It's Google hit were actually usable(ish) after you blocked the 300 or so screens of filler in the middle of the page trying to make you think you had to pay to see the answer instead of just setting a marble on your pgdn key and going to get a coffee while it scrolled.
– Dan Is Fiddling By FirelightOct 15 '15 at 15:49

1 Answer
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According to Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood (sorry, I don't remember the exact sources), by the time Stack Overflow was launched they were both reputed bloggers with quite a few followers. So just posting the announcement of the site launch in their blogs caused a significant amount of people to start using it, thus gaining the required momentum to continue growing. I for one learned about it in Jeff's blog (and I even remember voting for the site name in a blog post that contained a poll).

There was also the weekly podcast (promoted through now defunc IT Conversions starting from episode eight), started about four months prior, on 2008-04-16 (19 episodes before the public launch of Stack Overflow).
– Peter MortensenOct 15 '15 at 16:16